FitOKay's Journal, 19 March 2014

I did 40 minutes on the bike today =) Hopefully be back up to 60 minutes sometime next week. Since I had only eaten a banana and water for breakfast I'm goingbto do tge unprocessed foods day today. Eating 2 hard boiled eggs for lunch and the baked potato for dinner.  

I got to the point where I'm becoming a "master cook" in egg whites lol. They went from tasting bland, very much like carton, to very tasty. But it involves soy sauce and, from what I gather, it's very difficult to get non-GMO soy sauce there so you're safer going with some other type of sauce (did you know GMO food causes serious health problems including sterility in animals? Yikes!), which I'm sure will also do the trick. The main thing is that I don't eat the egg-whites warm. I scramble the whole content of the package (1 kg/ 35.3 oz) on a pan with some garlic paste (not much), and then put it in the fridge. Just like that, they already taste much better than warm. If you add 1 banana and some kind of sauce though, they will taste very good! (to me at least lol) I have to try some other sauce, maybe balsamic vinegar next time, instead of the soy and see how that goes :) Anyway, it's good for a good number of quick meals before you have to scramble more and it sates the hunger pretty well possibly due to all the protein in it :) Let's see, what more can my "extensive" knowledge in cooking can provide lol. I don't know if you like soup but this is a soup recipe I usually do. It's always the same in its basis which is beans, but I usually vary the vegetables which go in it. It's great in the way that you cook it on one day, you put it in the fridge and you have soup for lots of meals. Here's how I do it: I soak dehydrated beans the night before with about 10 cm/ 4 inches of water above "ground level", or "bean level" in this case lol. 10 to 12 hours they're ready for cooking. Throw the water, they're in, away. Put them in a pressure cooker. Add your desired amount of water (it's quantity of soup VS concentration of ingredients here). Never add salt while cooking in a pressure cooker (you'll do it afterwards). Turn on the heat. If using the pressure cooker, wait until the steam starts flowing out of it uninterruptedly, then count 20 minutes and turn the heat off afterwards. Depressurize the cooker according to the safety rules, remove the lid, turn on the heat again and now add salt (like a tbsp or a little more) and 4 tbsp (more or less) of olive oil. When it starts boiling, add one or two chopped onions, and vegetables at your liking (I don't know if there are soup vegetable bags available there but that's really convenient for this. If you have those add one bag of soup vegetables to it, depending on the size). But you can ignore the vegetables and just have the soup with the beans and the next ingredient which is the rice. wait one minute after adding the vegetables (or not) and add like half a cup of rice. Now just wait 10 to 12 minutes and the soup is ready. You can cool it down faster by placing the hot pot in a bucket of water and then put it in the fridge when it's not warm anymore. If the pressure cooker is too small for the amount of soup you want, which is common, you can use a second bigger pot and transfer the cooked beans there and start continue the rest of the soup from there. If you don't have a pressure cooker, the cooking time for the beans is a lot higher and the differences in the cooking process are that, you can add the olive oil and onions first thing and braise them a little bit before adding the water and you can also add the salt right after adding the water. After that, it's the same, you let it boil, add the vegetables, then wait 1 minute, and add the rice and then wait those 10 to 12 minutes. The cooking time for the beans without a pressure cooker is higher than an hour though (their cooking time is sometimes on the package)... You can use already cooked beans but these are considerably more expensive and usually come with preservatives... I always tell every little detail because I assume the person may not know. Anyway, that's my usual soup lol. I just ate one cup and I'm really full now :) Besides that, I usually also eat nuts but I can't say they have a great calorie-to-satedness ratio :) Whole milk is usually a great help for me. I recently began to eat a carrot here and there. They really make the hunger go away and they're low on calories :). They're also one of the ingredients which can go on your soup ;)  

Thank you very much Euhide! I actually think the reason I am so allergic to corn now is the gmo. I never liked corn but didn't have the huge issue I have with it now until some years ago... right about the time the newest gmo corn became the norm. That's when my peak flow dropped so drastically and my lungs went to crud. It doesn't help to be in the midwest with all the corn pollen, and even though I never ate corn from not liking it (which my doctor thinks was do to a minor sensitivity befor the gmo version sent the sensitivity into full blown anaphilactic allergy) there are so many corn derived ingredients, fillers and preservative that we didn't even know how much I was getting. They did a colonoscopy looking for deliac disease, which my oldest boy has. I have all the abnormal cell markers on that, but cutting wheat didn't help at all. If I hadn't nearly killed myself trying a bite of creamed corn befor feeding it to my, then, baby (and ending up in the ER from the allergic reaction swelling my throat shut) we may never have realized it was corn causing the issue. I keep as much corn out of my diet as possible, non gmos help, cooking using produce and etc.. helps. It's just tough with how easy it iscto sneak corn in through contamination or as processing agents, fillers or derived preservatives. 

*celiac, not deliac lol. Thank you again for the tips =) 

Get as far away from GMO as possible! That thing is hazard! :P. Sadly nowadays, there is definitely a myriad of corn derivatives in the food industry . The same thing happens with GMO soy beans and a few more foods. And it's very difficult to escape them especially if you eat processed foods or if you eat out a lot :P And it's very difficult for healthy food to compete with those foods in taste but it's definitely one of those cases where the body does not know what's best for itself :P 

No problem, I wish I new more things but I'm not very adventurous when it comes to cooking. I've been trying to change that recently though lol :) 

Oh my ignorance... I've just noticed that soy, even if non-GMO would also have to be gluten-free with Celiac :P  

Regarding the soup, you can't fill a pressure cooker above 2/3 or so of it's capacity I think or it will start shooting out water instead of just steam! If water starts coming out of the valve, you know you overfilled it. :) 

Lol, duly noted! 

* I meant GMO corn (getting sleepy lol)... 

:D